


Begin Again

by alocalband



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek Hale Deserves Nice Things, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Future Fic, Getting Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-16 23:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14821212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alocalband/pseuds/alocalband
Summary: Derek loses control of his full shift. This honestly wouldn't be an issue if Stiles hadn't shown up and made it one.





	Begin Again

**Author's Note:**

> My second piece for the [Sterek Zine](https://sterekzine.tumblr.com/), and my 50th work posted to AO3! Woo!
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy. Working on the stories for this zine really helped me get back into writing Sterek again, and I've definitely been inspired to keep going on other stories for this ship. <3

The days are easier if he begins them as a wolf. Which is convenient, seeing as Derek’s lost all control over his shift while asleep.

It started when he left Beacon Hills for what he hopes is the last time, and hasn’t let up since. Every time he goes to sleep, at some point in the night he shifts, and then wakes covered in fur, overheated from the blankets.

Instead of immediately shifting back, he goes for a run to work off the excess energy that he always feels when he’s on four legs. And it quickly becomes a habit he can’t break, but that leaves him feeling a little less burdened for the rest of the day.

So it isn’t even an issue really, despite his inability to control it.

Or, it _wouldn’t_ be an issue, if it weren’t for Stiles.

“Come here often?” the man in question asks with a smirk when he sits down beside Derek in the small coffee shop.

Derek heard him coming a mile away, smelled him coming from even farther, that particular scent and heartbeat so familiar to him even years later that he’d be able to pick it out of a crowd from just about any distance. But it still feels like a punch in the gut to be right beside it all again.

He doesn’t look up from the book he’s reading. Maybe this will all be easier if he pretends to be unaffected. “If I say yes, it’ll just make it easier for you to find me again.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Stiles tells him, like they’re the only two people in the world who are in on the joke. “We both know how much I enjoy a challenge.”

And just like that they fall back into being _Derek and Stiles_ , as though there were never any years in which they were simply, tragically, just a Stiles and a Derek, separate and unfinished.

The days run together, but in a slow, lazy sort of way that feels more comfortable than Derek’s ever known his days to be. Stiles works his way through grad school at the nearby Ivy League, and Derek pretends he’s got his shit together more than he really does while reading and gardening in his new home in this small New England town.

It was Laura’s idea to come here. Written out in a notebook Derek found when he finally made himself return to their New York apartment and sort through her things. _Places To Restart That Derek Won’t Hate,_ was underlined at the top of the page, and at the bottom of the long, mostly tongue-in-cheek list beneath it, was the name of this tiny town.

She was right. Derek doesn’t hate it.

The place is small enough to be calming, surrounded by enough forest that he can run freely when he’s fully shifted, and is close enough to a major city and a couple of universities to not be too isolating. Sometimes he takes the train into Boston, and sometimes he hides out in the woods for a week. It’s a tossup on any given day which he’ll prefer, but he has easy access to both.

So Derek understands why _he_ came here, but Stiles’ reasons are... a little less clear. Ostensibly it was because of a grad school acceptance. But when Stiles starts spending more time at Derek’s place than he does on campus, Derek has to ask the obvious.

“Did you come here because of me?”

Stiles looks up from the textbooks and notes he’s got spread out across Derek’s kitchen table and blinks owlishly. “I mean. Sort of? I thought we agreed not to talk about it.”

“We did?”

“Yeah, like. If you were going to bring up how unlikely it was that I’d end up going to school anywhere near where you now live, you woulda done it when I first found you. I figured we were good pretending that it was just fate or whatever.”

“Fate,” Derek repeats flatly.

“Yeah. Way less invasive than me having kept tabs on you through my dad’s law enforcement connections for the past few years.”

Derek shrugs a shoulder, and turns back around to the lunch he’s making, portions enough for two, even though Stiles didn’t ask for any. He didn’t have to. They’re both of them naturally adept at giving the other all the things they need before the other is even aware that they’re needed. “I just assumed you had.”

“And yet you’re not whipping out the restraining order? Because, let me tell you, it would not be the first time that’s happened to me. Not even the second, actually.”

“It’s as if you think I don’t know you at all.”

Stiles goes quiet at that, and when Derek glances back over his shoulder at him, he’s got his head cocked to one side, eyes assessing Derek like he’s seeing something there that wasn’t completely obvious thirty seconds ago. Finally, he smiles, small and careful and genuine. “But you do, don’t you?”

Derek ducks his head a little and returns his gaze to the pan on the stove in front of him. “Only well enough to not be all that surprised that you stalked me across an entire country just for the free food.”

Stiles laughs. Derek never seems to remember how much he misses the sound of it until he’s graced with its rare presence again.

They fall into bed together the same way they’ve fallen into everything else with each other. As though they’ve wanted to the entire time, but couldn’t help posturing otherwise. As though they’re finally admitting that the ongoing argument between them has only ever been a belligerent, stubborn effort to evade the vulnerability they both feel in the other’s presence.

The problem with this isn’t how hard and fast they fall. The problem isn’t that they go from zero to sixty in no time at all. From Derek leaning in close over Stiles’ shoulder to see what paragraph of his thesis is giving him so much trouble, and Stiles turning his head and kissing him like a question he’s been wanting to ask for years... to steady hands and whispered “I love you’s” in bed an hour later.

The problem is that Stiles notices when he wakes up next to something that isn’t human shaped.

He smiles and scratches behind Derek’s ears that first time, and makes a joke about dog breath being worse than morning breath. But he also notices when it happens again. And again, and again, and again...

“You can’t help it, can you?”

Derek looks away and focuses on getting dressed, his hair still wet from the shower he took after shifting back earlier. “What does it matter?”

Stiles has his elbows on his knees, sitting on the edge of the bed-- _their_ bed really, though it’s barely been a week--and still in his underwear. His bedhead is in rare form, but his eyes are piercing and startlingly serious. “It matters because I remember a whole lot of other shit you couldn’t help, once upon a time, and it always did more harm than good. It matters because I love you enough to not want to see you hurting yourself as a coping mechanism anymore.”

“This isn’t me hurting myself. It’s-- I think it’s helping. In a way.”

Stiles frowns, his brow furrowing as he considers this. “I want that to be true, Derek, but... I just want to know that you’re _choosing_ it, alright? I don’t think I can stand back and watch anything else get chosen for you, get forced on you. I-- I can’t. It hurts too much, man.”

Derek doesn’t know how to respond to that. He stares back at Stiles helplessly.

Stiles nods, like he knew all along that Derek wouldn’t be able to argue this with him on this one, but was hoping he was wrong. He gets up and gets dressed, and leaves for a class that Derek knows doesn’t actually start for another couple hours.

He doesn’t come back that night.

Derek tosses and turns, sleepless. Somewhere in the earliest hours of the morning, he sighs in defeat and shifts. He runs for hours, and when he returns, he curls up on the living room floor with one of the many articles of clothing Stiles has managed to leave behind, finally drifting off into a heavy unconsciousness.

When he wakes up, he’s human, and Stiles is standing over him with a soft sort of look in his eyes. There’s something raw and broken wide open in his expression, but determined too. “How do I help?”

“Just,” Derek swallows thickly. “Just be here.”

Stiles nods, determination solidifying into promise. “I can do that.”

Stiles being there doesn’t solve anything, it doesn’t fix anything, but it does prompt Derek to start looking at the areas of himself that he’d been avoiding before. With Stiles there, in his home, his bed, his arms, it’s a little easier to acknowledge his demons instead of ignoring them.

“Sometimes ‘moving _on_ ’ means ‘moving _through_ ,’” Stiles tells him with a wry sort of smile one night, and then rolls his eyes. “My therapist when I was a kid had some unrealistically high expectations of how well I was going to deal with the death of a parent. But, uh, I think I get it now.”

“Explain it to me,” Derek whispers into the darkened bedroom.

Stiles closes his eyes and resettles himself so that his head rests on Derek’s chest, and Derek’s view of his face is replaced with a view of the top of his mussed brown hair.

“I wouldn’t have come to find you if I didn’t think I might have a chance at deserving you. And I wouldn’t ever believe I could deserve you if I didn’t work my way through my own shit first. It’s not like I _let go_ of my baggage, because I honestly don’t know how to do that, you know? But I opened it up and sorted through it and eventually decided that all the parts of my life that royally sucked were still _parts of my life_ , and that’s never going to change.”

Derek pulls Stiles a little closer, and silently, desperately hopes that he wakes up still holding onto him.

“I just,” Stiles continues, “I did my best to figure out how to accept the pieces of myself that I always kept trying to amputate. And things got a whole hell of a lot easier once I wasn’t so preoccupied all the time with where exactly to cut.”

The thing is, if Derek were to try to cut out all of the bad in himself, he’s not sure there’d be anything left. There isn’t a whole lot about Derek that he likes about himself anymore, though he hasn’t thought of it in such simple terms in a very long time, maybe not since he was a kid. It’s just been a constant, undeniable truth. And the few things he does like, he’s never put enough stock in to bother acknowledging.

He explains this to Stiles over breakfast, and Stiles frowns at him with sad, shining eyes the entire time.

“Alright, big guy, I think it’s time to break out the good old murder board again.”

Derek doesn’t understand what Stiles is talking about until two days later, when suddenly there’s a giant bulletin board hanging up in his living room, with a stack of index cards, a cup of pushpins and a ball of blue yarn beside it.

Stiles’s hands wave about wildly as he talks, a pen in one and an index card in the other. “It’ll be just like solving a case. I mean, if I could _tell_ you what to like about yourself I would, but you’d never fully believe it. So. We’re gonna have to gather all the evidence and prove it to you.”

He tosses the ball of yarn at Derek, who catches it just before it hits him in the face, and studies it dumbly, overwhelmed. “Blue?”

Stiles sidles up to him with a grin, and pats his cheek. “Because you’re pretty.”

The first index card Stiles pins up says simply: _Great Ass._

Derek tears it down and replaces it with: _Well Read._ Because if he’s going to indulge Stiles in this ridiculous exercise, he’s at least going to do it honestly, and he loves a good book enough not have too many horrible associations with the act of reading.

It takes months before the board is full.

Months during which Derek starts seeing a therapist in the city and spends hours after every session, sometimes days, fully shifted and unable to turn back, no matter how much Stiles bribes and pleads. Months during which he slowly relearns himself through the eyes of someone who thinks he’s worth a damn, and attempts to figure out what, of those parts that Stiles sees, are the ones Derek genuinely likes as well.

Connecting each idea, finding correlations and patterns in the index cards that make it onto the board, is what makes the whole endeavor really work. For every thing about himself that Derek tries to claim is a positive attribute, together he and Stiles manage to tie it back to something greater at its root, and to then find a more accurate description that leaves Derek a little winded with the thought that it might describe _him_.

 _Strength_ turns into _support_.

 _Survival_ turns into _perseverance_.

 _Full shift_ eventually becomes _All the best parts of my mother that are still alive in me_.

“What about you?” Derek asks idly one evening on the couch, Stiles tucked under one arm as they watch a cheesy made-for-TV Christmas special that Stiles claims is a classic. “I like _you_. We should add that to the board.”

Stiles swats at his chest like he’s being intentionally idiotic. “I don’t count, doofus.”

“Of course you do. One of the things I like most about myself is how much I love you. Hell, it’s probably the biggest step forward I’ve taken in years.” He says it easily, because it is easy. The only thing that ever _wasn’t_ easy and natural and _right_ about him and Stiles was how hard they both worked to keep themselves from admitting it.

Stiles goes still and silent for a long moment, and then he sits up and reaches forward to grab the remote and turn off the television. When he turns back to face Derek, his expression is carefully neutral. “Is that... Does that mean...” He draws in a deep, steadying breath. “If I hadn’t come here, would you still...?”

Derek doesn’t need him to finish the question to understand what he’s getting at. If Stiles had never shown up at that coffee shop, had never kept tabs on Derek from the moment he left Beacon Hills, had never made the first move or inserted himself into Derek’s new life... Would Derek still feel the same way?

Would Derek have ever gone after him instead?

The answer is as complicated as it is obvious. Because maybe Derek always needed the instigating that Stiles provides in order to get here. Maybe every bit of forward momentum in their relationship so far has all been at Stiles’ stubborn prompting...

But, yes, Derek would still love him. And, yes, eventually, if perhaps years and years down the line, Derek would have found his way back to him.

He’s not very good at pushing himself into healthy decisions without Stiles there to poke and prod him through it. He’s not as quick about it or as efficient, and he gets tangled up in his own inner battles too often not to get sidetracked half the time. But he would’ve gotten here, he’s certain of it.

There is no way, in any version of reality, that he wouldn’t have gotten back to Stiles somehow. That Stiles and Derek would ever have remained simply, tragically, just a Stiles and a Derek, separate and unfinished.

“Yes,” Derek tells him, with the kind of confidence he usually has to fake.

Stiles tackles him right there on the couch.

They don’t manage to make it all the way back to the bedroom until several hours later, when Derek has to pick up a drowsy, sated Stiles and carry him there. Outside, the snow keeps falling, reflecting the neighbors twinkling holiday decorations. It’s a good night.

The next morning, Derek wakes up human.

He presses a smile into a sleeping Stiles’ hair, unable to wipe the expression off his face long enough for an actual kiss. And then he shifts into the wolf that looks so much like his mother’s wolf it startles him a little every time. He shifts, and he runs, and he returns home full of a breathless contentment, the seeds of which were always there, but have finally started to sprout.

He shifts, and he runs, and he returns home. Not unburdened so much as... settled. Present. Whole. And looking forward to getting to choose exactly this every morning for the rest of his life.


End file.
